The Most Intimidating Video Games

You know what gets in the way sometimes? Life. Life gets in the way. That means you have to sometimes take a break from things you enjoy; playing sports on the weekends, reading a book a week, and even gaming. And while some things about gaming will remain lodged in your brain, the more complicated parts such as, oh I don’t know, how to actually play the games can be hard to remember. Here are some games that can be particularly intimidating to get back into…

Overwatch

First person shooters are always hard to get into; people have been playing them since day one, so they know the maps, they know which weapons work the best for any given situation, hell they’re even just familiar with the characters. Overwatch has all of that standing in your way, PLUS it’s team-based, which means your newbie ass is going to be letting people down for weeks, if not months. I don’t like letting people down.

League of Legends

League of Legends makes new players ask themselves the age old question “What the hell is a jungler?” I imagine League of Legends is easier to break into if you’re already familiar with the MOBA genre, but I wasn’t, and guess what? I sucked and everyone on my team got mad at me because my bad play meant that the other team got way stronger than us and I decided to take my teammates’ advice and log off forever.

Final Fantasy XIV

With the inclusion of Final Fantasy XIV on this list, we are now 3/3 on all of these games being online ones that you play with friends and/or strangers, and thus continues my trend of being terrified of letting other people down, even in a video game. But there’s not only the fear of keeping people down, it’s also that this game is just so complicated. You gotta pick a class, and a job, and then find the right build for that job. And God help you if you’re playing it on PlayStation 4, good lord are the controls ever complicated to master on a stupid controller. And this game is maybe the MMORPG that gives you the most assistance with all the stuff, and even then it seems incredibly difficult to get into.

The Witcher 3

Not only is the third installment of The Witcher the first one to be on PlayStation, it also was critically acclaimed in a way very, very few games are. So I was like “Yeah, I’ll get this game!” Hey, guess what? The game has so much lore and backstory, plus I’ve got no idea how the coat and powers really work, and on top of that it is VERY massive. Like, this game is… it’s big. Really big. There are so many questions, and so much treasure, and also just a lot of THINGS to see, that it’s really overwhelming at first. The main reason I stuck it out with this one is that my friend was also playing it, and I’m very competitive.

EVE Online

Every time someone who plays EVE Online (there are admittedly not a ton of people who fit this description in my life) they just end describing what sounds to me like a second job. Sir, no thank you.

Street Fighter

I played Street Fighter II when I first got into gaming, and it was already intimidating then. There were no higher stakes than “I’m paying a quarter to do this, and if I just get my ass beat right away it will not have been a sound investment”, but at least then it felt like we were all on a relatively even playing field. There were no combos in those days, no combo breakers, and the console versions took a while to come out, so people weren’t at home practicing all day and night.

Hearthstone

Hearthstone has the depth of World of Warcraft, but it’s also a card game, which means you have to go through all of the effort of collecting good cards. Sure, you can spend actual money to get really good cards (there’s a pretty good argument to be made that Hearthstone is the most popular pay-to-win game out there) but those of us who don’t have unlimited money to spend in an incredibly stupid way have to earn those cards the old fashioned way — grinding through match after match. Winning those matches makes it easier to get the resources needed to accumulate better cards, which means my stupid newbie ass is stuck doing things as slowly as possible, while being very aware that everyone I’m playing against is sitting in front of their TV computer thinking “This guy sucks hard.” Yeah, I do, but that doesn’t mean it’s a polite thing to think!